If you are super intimidated to start cooking in an Instapot, it's fine to get meal kits like this.
Literally dump it all in with a slow-cooker spices packet and 6 hours later you have days of food. Then start adding more of stuff you like such as extra onions or potatoes.
Tyson Ready for Slow Cooker Boneless Beef Roast with Vegetables Meal Kit, 3.9 lb https://www.walmart.com/ip/21553448
And you don't need every ingredient or a recipe for lots of slow cooker things. Today I'm just putting left over stuff. Onion soup mix, brown gravy mix, pre-cut chuck roast beef pieces (which I optionally browned in a pan first), an onion, mushrooms, and a bunch of garlic cloves.
It's really hard to fuck it up. I've decided I used too many mushrooms but guess what I just won't eat all of them. It's a soup you have a fork.
When you make your own food at home you realize how little meat and other premium ingredients you get in prepared food. Like $10 of chuck roast at Walmart could be the same amount of meat as $150 of DoorDash.
I know this is basic but no harm in being approachable. Been doing this for years now I wasted so much money on restaurant food.
Instapots are (optionally) pressure cookers but the reason they're so popular is they introduced a series of clever designs and that interlock to make them very safe with all the benefits of cooking under pressure. Including an overpressure valve for the outer vessel and other governors. You can find occasional stories about them failing but if it was a real problem they'd quickly be a social media pariah. I feel totally safe.
Just be mindful of not crazy overfilling where during (unnecessary) manual pressure release you allow the liquid to bubble up and sputter out the top. Even then it's designed to be easy to knock back closed. It's not been a problem for me.
Really it's a bunch of cool engineering. The old stove pressure cookers were frankly nightmare fuel.
The modern iteration of historically dangerous appliances are really interesting if you go into understanding them. Natural gas house furnaces are another example where there is a cascade of tests and sensors including fallback dedicated sensors that must all return safe to proceed and continue operation.
@TindrasGrove @SwiftOnSecurity
Do you have a description of what exploded? (I'm surprised by explosions: _flow_ water heaters had failure modes of starting fires, but ~no way to create large enough pressure to explode. I'd rather expect fires and scalding.)
The patent referenced in that article describes a machine that has a piston pump to spray water and has an open holding tank for water that's supposed to be heated from underneath. I expect the worst that can happen (modulo someone setting stuff on fire with the external heater) is very hot water being sprayed in the wrong direction.
Do you know if the pressure used by dishwashers increased early on? I frankly realized only now that I have no clue whatsoever even about the pressure my dishwasher uses.
@robryk Data was based on a memory of a thing I saw once upon a time... and Google is not helping. Sigh.
So, if memory serves, during the development of models that used actual pressurized water (instead of the earlier models that just poured water over the dishes or swished the dishes around in water), the part that would build up the pressure and eat would fail rather spectacularly and painfully.
So, "explosion" may not be the best word, but there were definitely some nontrivial safety issues until that got sorted.
Pretty decent overview here: https://www.uspto.gov/learning-and-resources/journeys-innovation/historical-stories/ill-do-it-myself
An early home model (1930's) here: https://www.wisconsinhistory.org/Records/Article/CS2619